Interview with Dr. David Kilcullen
Interview with Dr. David Kilcullen
by Octavian Manea
Download the full article: Interview with Dr. David Kilcullen
What would success and victory look like in a counterinsurgency (COIN) operation? What specific role should the Western expeditionary forces should have in this fight?
What would victory look like? It doesn’t look like victory in a conventional military campaign. Insurgency is much like a disease. It has very negative symptoms that affect the whole of society. Victory in COIN is a lot less like military victory and a lot more like recovering from a disease. If you think about the last time you were sick, you may not able to get out of bed, you had to take medicine, you couldn’t do the things you wanted to do, but gradually you got stronger and you were able to do more. You might have continued to take antibiotics for a few weeks until you were completely better, but basically, sooner or later, you forgot that you were sick.
When we see societies that have recovered from an insurgency, we typically don’t see a single big military victory. What we see is a slow gradual improvement to the point where a society comes back to full functioning. Now in the case of Afghanistan the problem is that the country hasn’t functioned properly for at least one generation. Afghanistan in particular is not a counterinsurgency in a classical sense. It is actually a stability operation. We really care about the Taliban because they make the country unstable. But there are other things that make the country unstable as well, including the Afghan government, the destabilization by Pakistan, the corruption and criminal activity, the drugs. There are a lot of things that must be dealt with. If we were to defeat the insurgents, in a military sense tomorrow, and not fix all those others problems, a new Taliban would arise next year. We must think more broadly than counterinsurgency in the context of Afghanistan.
What is the role of foreign forces? I think that the role of foreign forces is to create an environment that is conducive to stability and societal recovery. If you think that victory is when the society recovers, then what we have to do is to create an environment that fosters this recovery. But there are limits to what we can do: we can set the conditions for the Afghans to come together or Iraqis to come together and solve their problems. But the long history of counterinsurgency emphasizes that foreigners can’t fix all these issues. It has to be the locals.
Download the full article: Interview with Dr. David Kilcullen
Interview with Dr. David Kilcullen conducted by Octavian Manea (Editor of FP Romania, the Romanian edition of Foreign Policy).
